NAPE begs more questions than answers- for the moment

Neil Johnston

Neil Johnston is a pharmacist who trained as a management consultant. He was the first consultant to service the pharmacy profession and commenced practice as a full time consultant in 1972, specialising in community pharmacy management, pharmacy systems, preventive medicine and the marketing of professional services.
He has owned, or part-owned a total of six pharmacies during his career, and for a decade spent time both as a clinical pharmacist and Chief Pharmacist in the public hospital system.
He has been editor of i2P since 2000.

The ideal of having quality continuing pharmacy education, delivered in digestible “bite-sized” chunks plus convenience of delivery at an economical cost has been a dream for pharmacists for as long as I can remember.With the advent of the new Australian Pharmacy Board there will be requirement for all pharmacists to undertake suitable education to maintain their registration.While there are many acceptable education streams coming from the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia (PSA), the Pharmacy Guild of Australia (PGA) and the Australian College of Pharmacy Practice (ACPP), there is not a high degree of planning to anticipate all pharmacist needs.For example, the delivery of professional services for a fee – there is no identifiable pathway enabling individual pharmacists to develop a professional practice that could be incorporated into a community pharmacy, a primary health care organisation, a medical centre or other suitable location.

Recently, the University of Sydney, Monash University, The University of Queensland and the University of South Australia founded the National Alliance for Pharmacy Education (NAPE). The vision of NAPE according to Professor Iqbal Ramzan, Dean of Pharmacy at the University of Sydney is "to support the on-going advancement of the pharmacy profession through provision of high quality, flexibly-delivered award courses, by leveraging the resources, experience and expertise from its University members."

Because this is a very recent venture there would be some obvious gaps to be filled, so I would like to pose some questions. Firstly, the word “national” implies that NAPE will exist in all states and territories within Australia. Obvious omissions from the founding list include Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory – will they be included? Secondly, there are some universities with special resources that have not been included. For example, Charles Sturt University in NSW has one of the largest libraries of distance education modules in Australia, with considerable experience in delivering education to rural environments. Will they be included? And I am sure there are other universities with specialty offerings that could be considered.

The greatest needs in pharmacy education are low cost and decentralisation, coupled with quality of content. With the growing need to regulate admissions to pharmacy schools now embarrassingly apparent, universities may use NAPE to expand their fee structure to fill the gaps that would occur with the rationing of student intakes. The temptation to charge high fees for special accreditations thus looms as a potential barrier to accessing NAPE education. Hopefully this will be considered by the NAPE management. The strategy of focussing additional attention to the needs of post-graduate pharmacists instead of new students and undergraduate pharmacists is a sound one, because there are more graduate pharmacists than marketable skills. Appropriate skills are needed to convert those surplus pharmacists as part of new income streams that can pay and gainfully employ new graduates.

To decentralise education NAPE may have to develop a form of franchising to create the structure to get their material out into the “time-poor” market place. One form of franchisee may be the new Primary Health Care Organisations (PHCO) currently replacing the old Divisions of General Practice. Looking at the potential of these organisations to contain an education division opens up new horizons in that composite education modules can be developed to embrace all the primary health care workers in these organisations (plus their community peer group), where there is a need for commonality of content where appropriate. Having all the health professions on the one sheet of paper creates the opportunity for these professions to meet and appreciate each other’s strengths and weaknesses – something that pharmacy would definitely benefit from. The decentralisation of continuing education would greatly benefit rural and remote health professionals, but it would also assist city-based professionals. High levels of traffic and congestion are beginning to paralyse mobility and there is certainly no need to attend lectures physically at a university, given the speed and quality of today’s Internet system.

Content will also need to be balanced to include management, marketing and IT modules as well as the clinical component, otherwise the new clinical skills will not be converted into dynamic services.

Regional facilitators/mentors will need to be also considered to give a face for each student to relate to.

There is a lot of “catch up” before pharmacists can claim their continuing education matches that of say, doctors or nurses, but initial statements being issued from NAPE are encouraging.

"This is about the provision of quality pharmacy education from undergraduate, right through to postgraduate and continuing education level" says Professor Ramzan.

“As the leading providers of integrated, research-led undergraduate and postgraduate pharmacy education in Australia, the founding members of NAPE aim to lead the development of new postgraduate units and awards and to foster the continuity of pharmacy education to meet the high demand by pharmacists for quality postgraduate education.”

"We are anticipating increased demand for postgraduate award courses, for example demonstrating competency, credentialing or new models of practice in the future" says Professor Ramzan.